MinFin against zero gas tax for East Siberia
NOVY URENGOI. Jan 15 (Interfax) - The Russian Finance Ministry has not backed an initiative by the Energy Ministry to zero out natural resource extraction tax (NRET) for gas field in the Far East and East Siberia, Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov told Interfax.
Shatalov said any discounts should be awarded in the context of the universal formula for calculating gas NRET. "This should be resolved in the framework of the formula," he said.
But agencies have not yet settled on a common approach to the formula, Shatalov said. "There are various approaches to the coefficients. In our version, the formula includes external market prices, mainly contract prices, domestic market prices and transportation. The question is whether to include gas condensate or not, what will determine the profitability of this production. Then there are various coefficients, depending on the quality of the gas, its richness, depth, regional coefficients," Shatalov said.
"There might be zero NRET for new fields, or close to zero, the issue here is what to do about the ageing fields: do we award reducing coefficients, like Gazprom is asking for, or don't we?" he said.
The differing views on this issue mean agencies are still working on the formula. "If you take the factors or parameters that go into this formula, they are largely similar, but how they are combined and what we get as a result - here the approaches differ," Shatalov said.
But he said the agencies would eventually come up with a universal method for this formula. "We will come to an agreement. It's not all lost. We are moving closer," he said.
Energy Minister Alexander Novak said in the middle of December that "we have no differences with the Finance Ministry regarding zero NRET for East Siberia and the Far East." The Energy Ministry proposes to zero the tax on gas fields in thee regions for 25 years.
The NRET formula should be introduced in 2014.